Did you know Google Analytics can do this?

What’s the point of promoting your products online if you can’t track the results and see if your strategy is working? Analytics software is a must-have for any respectable business that doesn’t assume their business is successful just by counting the number of visitors with a counter.

As a business, you need to understand the visitor’s behaviour and, based on that, find new ways to reach them and grow your business. Google Analytics is Google’s popular free analytics tool that allows you to access both general and in-depth statistics on your site.

Many use it to get basic details on how many visitors they’re getting but there’s a lot more to it than that. So, here are Google Analytics’ less known features that could tell you a bit more about your site’s visitors, hopefully some apply to your site.

See what your visitors are searching for on your site

This is different from the visitors’ search queries visitors on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. This time we’re focusing on the words visitors enter directly into your site’s search box. While most businesses are interested in the keywords people are searching on the web to get to their site, looking at what they’re searching inside your site is just as important.

Why it’s good: You can see exactly what a visitor is searching for on your site and also on what page he was on when he made the search. As well as the search results you will also see what page the visitor chose from the results.

How to set up site search:

Go to your Google Analytics standard reports

Click on the “Admin” button in the top right

Click on “Profile Settings”

Go to the bottom where you’ll find “Site Search Settings”

Select “Do Track site Search”

See who’s downloading your e-books

Google Analytics has a great feature that allows you to see statistics on document downloads or other links. You simply need to add a small piece of JavaScript to the link you want to track and Google will track it for you.

Why it’s good: This is perfect if you’re publishing an e-book, a report or any other document and want to see how many visitors have clicked on it and downloaded it. You can also use this feature to test the links from a specific page and see which one gets more clicks.

How to set up it up:

Export your Analytics reports

This feature will save you a lot of time as it allows you to export the data from your Analytics account to a CSV file and then open it with Excel. You can also export it in a PDF format.

Why it’s good: Say you need to send a report to your marketing department but not everyone has access to the Google Analytics account. So, the easiest way to show them some stats is to export the report they’re interesting in seeing and then send it via email.

How to export a report:

Open the report you want to export and click Export; then select the format in which you’d like to export the file: PDF, CSV, CSV for Excel or TSV.

Filter yourself out

Every company out there should use this feature if they want to get accurate statistics. By setting up this filter, you’re telling Google to remove all traffic coming from your company network. If you’re also collaborating with an agency outside your company network, filter them out too to ensure their visits do not inflate your real stats.

Why it’s good: It helps to get accurate statistics on your visitors by excluding traffic from your company’s employees and outside collaborators.